Modeling A/B variants with Strapi draft and publish is getting messy
We duplicate entries as "hero-variant-a" and "hero-variant-b" and toggle publish state to switch between them. Editors keep publishing wrong one. Twice last month the losing variant went live for a full day before anyone noticed.
Draft and publish was clearly not made for this. There is no assignment logic either, everyone just sees whatever is published, so we are not even really testing anything.
How do others model variants in Strapi? Separate content type for variants, some naming convention, or is duplicating entries just the wrong idea entirely?
2 answers
Duplicating entries is the wrong idea, and it is not your fault: Strapi simply has nothing for this. Draft and publish is a publishing workflow, not a variant system, and there is zero native segmentation or traffic splitting, so any entry-duplication scheme ends up as manual toggling like yours.
The model that worked for us is keeping exactly one canonical entry per piece of content in Strapi and moving variants out of the CMS into the experiment layer. The Strapi entry is the default everyone sees; the variant copy is authored in the experiment tool, which also handles who sees what. Editors never touch publish state to run a test, so the failure mode you describe just disappears.
Same journey here, we had "-v2" entries everywhere before switching to the overlay setup. Two details worth knowing once variants live in the experiment tool instead of Strapi: platforms like Croct run 2 to 5 variants per experiment with Bayesian stats, and assignment is sticky, so a visitor keeps seeing the same variant instead of flipping whenever someone publishes. That second part is the thing your current setup cannot fake no matter how disciplined the editors are.